S23’s school did the reverse. They tracked their graduates and how they did in college so that not only could they recommend where the student would get in, but recommend a school they were likely to finish in 4 years and be happy.
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Wouldn’t likelihood of graduating college be mostly related to the student’s college admission academic credentials and financial capability to afford the college?
For being happy, wouldn’t that be rather individualized based on student preferences?
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True but many high schools also provide a high school profile every year when they submit grades to colleges that shows where a student falls in a class, often by decile, based on GPA. So even if a college does not have data on the individual high school they may very well know where a kids grades fall in comparision to the rest of their high school class.
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Not necessarily. Schools can take longer than 4 years if there is poor advising or trouble registering for class. And I think “happiness” is a great measure. They follow many data points such as access to counseling/accommodations, how well their graduates do, if they feel they’ve had good advisor, access to professors.
My information is dated, but my son was waitlisted at several schools where he had the highest GPA and test scores from our HS. These were LACs where he showed no love (e.g., didn’t visit) that, I think, decided they were his deep safeties and they didn’t want to lower their yield numbers by admitting him but would accept him if he wanted to go there. But, according to our school’s Naviance, he was among the strongest applicants from our HS ever to the schools.
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Does your school have a lot of recruited athletes? They skew the scatter plot of smaller LACs.
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Not sure which LACs you have. But it seems top LACs such as Williams and Amherst do not consider interest and interview.
He got into top NESCACs and some Ivies. I believe he was waitlisted at Bates and according to Naviance, he was the at the absolute upper right of the applicants to Bates.
Bates is a high ED acceptance, not so much non-ED school.
I don’t know about your year but in the last CDS, there were 306 ED admittees. 488 Enrolled.
So it could be based on that alone. In this CDS, they rate Demonstrated Interest as Important, which is higher than most every school.
So high academics alone may not play fully into their decision….just hypothesizing.
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I think I concur. They were looking at who wanted to go there. I don’t think ED was so big back then, but demonstrated interest was important. What was surprising was that he got into a couple of the other schools that we thought cared about demonstrated interest without demonstrating interest.
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Similar experience for my DC20—accepted by Williams, Middlebury, and Colby and WL’d at Bates, while classmates with lower stats were accepted. DC toured (in freezing February) and interviewed. 
But probably not at NESCAC schools where the admissions standards for athletes are similar to other students.
Or some less selective universities where the NCAA minimum academic standards are higher than those universities’ regular admission standards.